Education technologies and teacher’s professional development. The project Motus (Monitoring Tablet Utilization in School) run by Cremit

This paper intends to deepen the relationship between teachers’ professional development and technology as educational issue, through the discussion of a case study - the project Motus that combines research and intervention as core actions – focused on the introduction of mobile devices in nine Italian schools (located in Lombardy, Emilia and Marche). The outcome of the project, recently discussed, allows us to highlight some of the dynamics in teachers’ innovation-related practices, reducing the weight of many conversations that combine innovation with technology, bypassing the human context in which the innovation would find place and meaning. The aim of the project was, in fact, to give teachers the opportunity to undertake a course on the pedagogical use of the device, and inquiry into the main pedagogical problems and opportunities related to the use of mobile devices in the classroom, with the support of a research center and the competence of a team of researchers: teachers were at the same time the main actors of the research – as researchers – and the most important “object” of the study, within the methodological framework (Blec Model) developed by Cremit.

"Teachers consider the device as a potential tool for increasing students’ interest in staying at school (47.8%) and in participation (46.7%). [...] The device seems to affect emotional and relational processes. In this sense, it appears to activate closeness between student and teacher and among the students themselves (80.8% of students, as referred thanks to students’ questionnaire and then during focus group). Students in fact indicate a robust increase in communication, not only among peers but also between teachers and students: teachers who respond also via e-mail and communicate with them outside the classroom are significant for students10 (and this seems to affect their performance at school and their well-being). The problematic features encountered by teachers are related to technical issues and the management of the classroom/students, with substantive equality between the problem of the applicability of tablet functions and teachers’ working time." (Carenzio et al., 2014, p. 34)